


the colour of heartache

by sequestering



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Fairy Tale Elements, M/M, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:20:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22533892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sequestering/pseuds/sequestering
Summary: There's a door where it shouldn't be.Zhenya's played on this section of lake a hundred times, a thousand times. He's collected stray pucks from every inch of the surrounding bank and he is certain that the door shouldn't be there. For one, it's set into the bank at such an angle that it leads into the middle of a thornbush. For another, it wasn't there yesterday.
Relationships: Sidney Crosby/Evgeni Malkin
Comments: 21
Kudos: 148





	the colour of heartache

**Author's Note:**

> Proving to myself that it is, in fact, possible to plan and write a short fic to deadline without it turning into 20k words of angst.
> 
> Detailed and mildly spoilery content warnings in the end notes should you have any particular concerns. There's nothing that I would have thought required a tag but please let me know if you feel differently.
> 
> Written for the [SidGeno Photo Challenge](https://sidgenophotochallenge.tumblr.com/).

There’s a door where it shouldn’t be.

Zhenya’s played on this section of lake a hundred times, a thousand times. He’s collected stray pucks from every inch of the surrounding bank and he is certain that the door shouldn’t be there. For one, it’s set into the bank at such an angle that it leads into the middle of a thornbush. For another, it wasn’t there yesterday.

It takes him a few minutes to work out what it is, the door’s dark blue paint barely visible in the dwindling twilight. Then he jerks back, stumbling over his edges like he hasn’t done in years and bolts for the far side of the lake.

He throws himself to the ground and tugs at his skate laces with numb, clumsy fingers, heart pounding in his ears. Keeping his eyes glued resolutely to the ground, he shoves his feet back into trainers. He doesn’t bother doing them up, doesn’t care if he trips, just sets off for home as fast as his shaky legs will move.

He doesn’t look back.

-

Zhenya listens, curled into a lumpy blanket, as his mama calls the emergency hotline.

“Yes, a blue door - dark blue - next to the Krivoye Lake… Which side? Zhenya, which side?”

"Which side?” He repeats thickly. The adrenaline is wearing off and it’s leaving his head woolly and his tongue slow.

“Which side of the lake, my little one?”

He pulls his thoughts into order. “The east bank,” he chokes out, “the one leading to the woods.” The one that’s so steep Zhenya’s never managed the climb, so bristling with thorns and sharp-fingered branches that even Denis has long since given up on it. It should be impassable.

Mama repeats it back down the phone and Zhenya listens to the indistinct grainy voices on the other end. They sound serious. His mama looks serious.

When she hangs up, she turns back to Zhenya and her face softens into a smile. “They say they’ll check out the lake themselves tonight, see what they can find. If they don’t find anything they might come round tomorrow and ask some questions.”

Her voice is steady, steady and safe. Nothing scares mama.

She leans down and tucks the blanket tighter around Zhenya’s shoulders. “You did just the right thing, little one,” she says with a kiss to his forehead. “I’m very proud of you.”

Zhenya’s been thirteen for three months now, he earns real money - good money, says his papa. All his coaches say he’s not a child any more and Zhenya knows he’s way too old to be called ‘little one’. Just this once, though, maybe just this once it’s okay.

He spends the rest of the evening in a chair in the corner of the kitchen being fussed over by mama. She clucks over him, making hot tea and, as a special treat, a whole pile of syrniki. When papa arrives back he pulls Zhenya into a painfully tight hug. Even Denis puts him in an affectionate headlock.

-

They interview Zhenya three different times, his mama always sat behind him glowering when they suggest that perhaps Zhenya got confused. Is he quite sure that he saw a door and not, say, a funny shaped tree?

Zhenya is very sure.

They search the land around the lake five times. Zhenya hears from Annika, whose father is a high level district official, that they bring in specially trained search dogs, twisted metal-and-glass instruments, and even a diviner. They do find traces, oddly shaped shadows and an echo in the air, enough to prove that something was there, that Zhenya saw what he saw. But they never find the door.

What they do accomplish, is to close off access to the lake for the rest of the winter.

“Fat lot of good they did,” grumbles papa as the detectives’ shiny shoes click away down the street towards their fancy cars.

Zhenya agrees. He trains at the rink in the mornings and the afternoons but in the evenings ice time goes to the figure skaters and the adults’ leagues. Sure, he could play street hockey with the other kids but that’s no fun. They want to mess around with trick shots, bouncing the puck between the wheels of passing cars or over the heads of passersby.

Zhenya’s got other concerns. He wants to get better, he needs to get better.

Life is so much better now, when papa can be home on the weekends to watch Zhenya’s games, when mama is home every day before five, when he and Denis never lie awake carefully not hearing mama and papa arguing. Zhenya knows that’s the Metallurg money, that the moment he stops scoring a goal per game the money will disappear.

And then there’s the other thing. The thing he hasn’t told anyone. A dream so fragile, so unbelievable, so audacious that Zhenya barely dares to think it to himself. Only sometimes, very rarely, when he’s played a game that’s truly spectacular, when he’s lying in bed and can still hear the jubilant cries of his teammates, does he look up at his Sergei Federov poster, screw up his eyes and wish so hard that his heart hurts.

The point is, Zhenya can’t afford to be missing months of extra ice time. He just can’t.

So only a week into the quarantine, Zhenya speeds out of school, stick and gloves tucked under his arms. Only instead of heading home with his classmates, he begins the trek up to the lake.

It’s beautiful. White and untouched and entirely his. Zhenya skates until his thighs are burning and his breath is tearing out his chest. He sees no one, nothing, and that night he smiles himself to sleep.

He does the same thing the next day, and the next.

-

On the sixth day, Zhenya’s executing a perfect mohawk turn when he sees a flicker in the corner of his eye.

It’s a flash of blue on the eastern bank.

His focus snaps away from his skates and he stumbles, falling hard to his knees. The icy hard shock brings tears to his eyes and for a few moments Zhenya sits stock still, his back to the woods. Maybe, he thinks wildly, if he can’t see it then it can’t see him.

He stays seated, ice melting into the seat of his jeans, an awful choking fear building in the back of his throat. It’s silent out here, so far away from town, from the rest of the world. Zhenya can’t hear anything from behind him. Almost against his own will he begins to turn his head. Slowly, achingly slowly the bank appears in his peripheral vision.

It’s there again, the fairy door.

It’s the same one as last time, nondescript with its dark paint chipped and fading. Totally unexceptional except that it’s a door to nowhere in a place where it has no business being.

Zhenya’s no fool. He might not pay much attention in school, but he knows about fairies.

They’re less common in Magnitogorsk - some say it's the iron in the hills - but they’re still there, in the background of history. Like everyone else, Zhenya grew up on stories of tsars who left their palaces for a stroll never to be seen again, of maidens who strayed into mushroom circles and danced until the dirt beneath their feet was slick with blood, of children who looked through strange doorways into magical lands and walked straight through them.

He knows that the proper thing to do when faced with a fairy doorway is to call the authorities. They’ll burn the door, salt the earth where it stood and lock the fairy back into its own realm.

But the authorities weren’t much good last time.

Zhenya climbs unsteadily to his feet and shifts back into his drills. He’s stiffer than usual, eyes fixed ahead of him, determinedly avoiding looking to his sides, but he gets through them.

As he leaves, he risks one quick look behind him. The door’s still there.

-

Zhenya stays away for all of two days before his resolve breaks.

He’s seen the door twice now and been totally alone both times. If it were going to hurt him, it would have done so already. He’s a teenager now anyway, he can handle himself. He’ll just be careful.

And careful he is. Zhenya makes a list of rules: don’t look directly at the door, don’t skate within five metres of the eastern bank, don’t hang around near the ice longer than necessary. He sticks to the rules and it’s funny how, after a while, even something as sinister and unknowable as a permanently closed fairy door becomes routine, just a part of the landscape.

It’s mid-December when that changes.

Zhenya has barely finished his warm-ups when he realises that there’s a kid watching him. He’s stood at the shore of the lake, a pair of battered skates laced to his feet and a wooden stick clutched in his hand.

“What are you doing here?” Zhenya yells with all the indignation he can muster. “It’s not safe.”

The boy looks blankly back at him. Nothing.

Zhenya sighs to himself irritably. If the kid tells anyone that they’ve been out on the lake, by an active fairy door, then they’re both going to be in serious trouble. He skates over to the edge, carefully not looking to the boy’s right.

“I said, what—” Zhenya breaks off. A shiver runs down his back - someone walking over his grave, his grandma would say. It’s like silence on a completely windless day or that moment when he swings to the very top of a swing set and, for less than second, he’s weightless.

Whatever’s in front of him isn’t a boy.

It looks like a boy. One of about Zhenya’s own age, maybe slightly younger, with dark hair and cheeks still round with puppy fat. But its ears curve into delicate points and, most importantly, it doesn’t feel like a boy.

They stare at each other.

It bares its teeth in a warped mimicry of a smile. It should be disconcerting - a shark-like grin with rows of tiny sharp teeth - but there’s something oddly genuine in its wide brown eyes. It opens its mouth and lets out a series of hisses and squeaks.

Zhenya blinks at it helplessly. It sounds like an angry cat and he has no idea what’s happening.

The fairy looks frustrated. It gestures to itself and lets out that same high-pitched squeak. Then it gestures expectantly at Zhenya.

If Zhenya’s legs weren’t so stiff with fear, rooting him to the spot, he has no doubt that he would have fallen over backwards. As it is, he just flinches slightly and slides back a few centimetres.

The fairy repeats the motion and Zhenya’s brain begins to catch up with proceedings.

He’s not telling the fairy his name. He may have broken every rule the in the book, he may be alone on a deserted lake and stood across from a fairy, but he is not telling the fairy his name. If the fairy didn’t kill him, his mama would.

Zhenya shakes his head, lips pressed tight together in case the fairy can steal the words off his tongue.

The fairy shrugs, unsettlingly human, and skates onto the ice, starting a slow circle around Zhenya. The motion would be threatening, predatory, except that the fairy is wobbling on its skates, like its legs aren’t quite used to the motion. It taps its stick on the ice and looks at Zhenya like it wants something.

Zhenya stares.

The fairy taps its stick again, impatient now.

Maybe Zhenya’s spent too much time on the ice, maybe this has all been some bizarre hallucination and his mama was right that he should be getting more sleep. He passes the puck to the fairy.

It catches the puck neatly on its stick, squeaks happily and wobbles off down the ice.

This is the weirdest fairy abduction in history. Zhenya shakes his head and skates after it.

-

And so Zhenya has a hockey buddy.

They don’t talk much - how could they? But somehow it works. It works well. A sharp-toothed smile when the fairy manages a slick off-the-foot reception, a fist bump after a tough one-on-one, a shout of celebration when Zhenya beats it in a foot race.

The fairy, it turns out, would make a good hockey player. It’s got quick hands, sharp eyes and an uncanny sense of where the puck’s going to bounce. The skating’s a bit shaky but it learns fast, skating off heavy falls with sheepish grins and great enthusiasm.

It’s dedicated, practicing when Zhenya arrives and long after he leaves. Zhenya wonders sometimes what fairies are supposed to do during the day - is it missed when it spends the whole day on the ice?

In general, though, he tries not to think too hard about the whole fairy thing. It likes to skate. Zhenya likes to skate. No one’s getting hurt so where’s the harm?

Plus, away from the lake, Zhenya’s playing like he’s on fire, like he owns the puck and the ice and the whole damn rink. Sergei is thrilled with him, likes to joke that Zhenya must have been blessed by something. Zhenya smiles and laughs and ignores the twinge of uncertainty. He’s not doing anything wrong - there are certainly no rules against training with a fairy.

-

By the time March melts into April, the fairy is just a part of Zhenya’s day. Maybe the best part. Perhaps it’s some weird form of fairy magic, but Zhenya’s never felt so in tune with anyone else. He knows where the fairy’s going to pass, he knows where it’ll be without looking behind him, he understands it’s squeaky giggles and it’s angry hisses.

On the day the ice is too thin to safely play on, Zhenya pulls the fairy to face him and explains, as best he can, that he won’t be coming back tomorrow. It’s hard, they’ve never needed to create a pantomime of the future tense and the fairy looks confused, confused and a little sad, when it finally seems to understand.

Something twists in Zhenya’s chest. He’s always had a weak heart, a soft heart his mama calls it.

He points at himself. “Evgeni.” It’s stupid, it’s so stupid and he could bite off his tongue the moment the word has passed his lips. This is a fairy, it might have big, sad eyes, but it’s still a fairy. He doesn’t say his last name and hopes desperately that that will be enough.

Then he gestures at the fairy and waits.

The fairy looks confused for a minute before a sharp-toothed smile stretches across its face. It repeats the word, shaping its mouth carefully around the unfamiliar syllables. “Geno,” it says slowly pointing at Zhenya. Then it gestures to itself and hisses.

Zhenya tries to repeat the hiss sound and the fairy giggles, high-pitched peels echoing around the lake and surrounding valley. Zhenya blushes and gives up. “Sid?”

The fairy nods and smiles happily. They stare at each other for a few more quiet moments before Zhenya turns and begins the slow trudge home.

-

For two more years, the freezing of the lake is the best part of Zhenya’s winter.

He tells himself it’s because it marks the beginning of the hockey season and hours of extra ice time. Maybe it’s even because he finally gets to properly push himself - Sid’s faster, quicker and smarter than anyone else Zhenya’s played with and he relishes the competition. It’s definitely not because of serious dark brown eyes, pink lips and an absurd high-pitched laugh.

They still don’t speak the same language but Zhenya does speak. First it’s drill instructions, skating tips and comments on the weather, but it morphs into something else.

Zhenya tells Sid everything. He tells him about his teammates and their matches, about mama and papa and Denis, about Metallurg and their money and their expectations - everyone’s expectations.

Sid doesn’t say anything, he never does. But he never complains either, just listens quietly and watches Zhenya with unblinking eyes.

Late one December evening, when it’s almost too dark to see the puck and Zhenya knows that he should have headed home hours ago, he even tells Sid about his Federov poster and the dreams that cling to it.

He’s a bit embarrassed but it feels nice, to tell someone after so long. Sid is a good secret keeper. Obviously he couldn’t tell anyone if he wanted to but there’s something else.

Hopes feel better with Sid, like they’re more than hopes - possibilities, even plans. Everything is better with Sid.

-

It ends abruptly, as all dreams must.

Zhenya’s seventeen, two months away from his first international tournament, when he takes a shove from a defenseman, catches an edge and crashes into the goal. He feels a pop in his knee. There’s a moment of dizzying confusion as he tries to work out whether that’s the goal or the goalie on top of him. Then his leg is on fire.

He drags himself off ice, hanging off the arm of a concerned teammate, mingled sweat and tears dripping down his face. The assistant-trainer near carries him into the dressing room where Zhenya collapses.

It’s a pain worse than anything he’s ever experienced, wave after wave of nausea-inducing agony leaving him gritting his teeth and shaking. He’s a hockey player, he can handle pain. What he can’t handle is the bone-deep certainty that this isn’t a bruise or a nasty sprain. This is bad.

-

Zhenya’s not wrong.

His mama holds his hand and cries when the doctors give him the results. His papa leaves the room. Zhenya says nothing. He hasn’t said anything since the accident. There isn’t really anything to say.

-

For a while, time means very little to Zhenya.

He drifts between the hospital and his home. People talk to him and he ignores them so they talk about him instead. Zhenya doesn’t really care.

Metallurg will pay for the initial surgeries, they’ll even pay for the recovery and a few months of rehab. Sergei assures Zhenya that they’re being unusually generous, that he should feel grateful to have a supportive club in this difficult period.

Zhenya tries to feel grateful but it’s so hard, it’s so hard to feel anything.

After six months, the rehab period comes to an end. Zhenya can walk short distances, he can climb stairs and, with time, he might be able to skate in slow and painful circles. He takes down his Federov poster, strokes its worn and wrinkled edges one last time and tries not to feel anything.

After eight months, mama goes back to work full time. Papa starts leaving job adverts on the kitchen table - factory work, admin duties, nothing too strenuous. Zhenya understands. His world has ended but life drags on around him. There are bills to be paid - a lot from the hospital - and there’s less money now.

-

It’s been a whole year since the accident by the time that Zhenya thinks he can manage the journey to the lake alone. It’s much further on crutches, the mud makes the supports slippy and Zhenya keeps losing his balance. He reaches the bank with bruised hands and a screaming knee.

There’s no one there. No door, no Sid, no nothing.

Zhenya throws sticks and rocks onto the untouched ice until dusk begins to settle over the lake, casting strange, twisted shadows across the ice. A lump is beginning to build in the back of his throat and there are tears prickling at his eyes. He blinks them back angrily. What did he fucking expect.

He sits by the shore and watches the shadows darken and lengthen.

There’s a squeak from behind him.

Zhenya doesn’t move.

Another squeak. That’s an indignant squeak now and Zhenya can almost see Sid’s face all screwed up with annoyance. He hates being ignored.

Zhenya turns around slowly. “I’m sorry, Sid,” he says. “No more skating for me.”

Sid’s stood behind him. He’s out of his skates, barefoot on the frozen ground. Zhenya wonders idly whether he even feels the cold.

He’s standing in front of that same chipped, peeling door that so scared Zhenya all those years ago. This time, though, the door’s open revealing a soft golden light that clings to Sid’s silhouette.

Sid squeaks again, it’s gentler this time and finishes with the word ‘Geno’. He’s holding out a hand.

Zhenya pulls himself to his feet, ignoring the stab of agony in his leg. He takes a step toward Sid then hesitates. He’s not scared exactly but he knows what Sid is, he knows what this is. Zhenya swallows. “You’ll come too?”

Sid smiles, sharp-toothed, sweet and still so very earnest.

Zhenya takes his hand and walks through the door.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning: some disturbing imagery, career ending injury, bad language.
> 
> A big thank you to the challenge mods!
> 
> I am on [Tumblr](https://sequestering.tumblr.com/post/190613245690/my-sadly-late-slightly-out-of-control).


End file.
